Aberdeen Among Top 10 Best Places To Start A Business

Aberdeen Among Top 10 Best Places To Start A Business

May 13, 2015 Aberdeen was recently ranked eighth in NerdWallet’s list of the Best Places to Start a Business in North Carolina.

According to NerdWallet, Aberdeen bills itself as a “quaint little railroad town steeped in history” and is famous for the Aberdeen Carolina & Western Railway, the largest privately held regional freight railroad in North Carolina. The community of about 6,500 residents recently got news that Reliance Packaging, which makes printed bags and rollstock, is expanding its operations in Aberdeen, bringing several dozen new jobs to the small town. Aberdeen has 540 businesses and roughly $1.5 million in average revenue per business, according to the NerdWallet survey. The Moore County Partner in Progress, the region’s economic development organization, has extensive information on Aberdeen’s business community.

A few key takeaways from the NerdWallet survey:

Technology is crucial

Tourism and seniors give the state a boost

Small doesn’t necessarily mean small time

How NerdWallet created these rankings:

The survey was based on U.S. Census data covering 121,462 businesses in 115 communities in North Carolina and ranked the communities based on two key metrics.

One was business climate, which made up 65% of the overall score and included the average annual revenue of businesses, the percentage of companies with paid employees and the number of companies per 100 people.

The other metric takes into account the health of the local economy, which made up 35% of the total score. It covered such factors as median annual income, median annual housing costs and the unemployment rate.